Daily skirmishes between Legacy Media and New Media. Should there be an LM/NM Scoreboard at the end of each news cycle?

Bigger discussion here really than I have time for – but I have blogged it extensively in the past – see my ear;lioer posts here on digimediafinance.com

The issue in the article is that the reporter was too credulous to Moonves’ coyness:

Content creation IS moving away from central productions. Period. CBS has never been in films, only TV. And TV is diversified and dying as a mass distribution channel, only a few steps behind newspapers and magazines. I myself have not really watched TV in over 2 years. All my choices about how to spend my entertainment time come from online now. And I am almost ,well, more than 25 years old, think about what kids are doing?

Truth is, money in CA has always been in distribution, at least post-1947 Paramount decision. And so CBS is in a tough spot – they don’t control distribution in any channel at all – that comes from Northern CA now, the apples, the googles, and other tech companies.

CBS (and others) can bet the farm, or even an acre or two, that they will be able to find a way to create mass interest in small-screen stuff, and deliver it somehow while keeping a share of the profits.

Good luck to them on that – from a production side, in a post-youtube era, video production and finance is mirroring the earliest developments in the film industry circa 100 years ago. We all know how that turned out, but the key factor was the limited distribution and consumption points – the theaters themselves.

There is scant evidence that if the finance of production and production models themselves recapitulate history that the end result will be the same, or that CBS (or others) have any grand claim to knowing how to make it work out.

If anything CBS is caught in the middle – a classic Michael Porter strategic trap – they don’t have the customers at the big screens that the movie studios are working hard to keep by inventing 3d, and they don’t have any particular brand loyalty among the non-tv crowd, while tv watchers are fading away or dying off.

Bottom line: Content NEVER was king. What was and still is king is the social experience, the interaction with the content and other human beings that the distribution and content consumption points engendered.

Why? Those things scale exponentially with the number of viewers, while the content itself only scales linearly. Google, Apple, everyone in the Bay Area (and the rest of the online world such as India and Eastern Europe) is familiar with the unrefuted research in this area, and they are focusing their innovations accordingly. All the while, as the research predicts, groups like CBS are rapidly losing discretionary market share to other content sources.

I say Moonves is full of nothing but Hubris here n this article . In the end, he is bluffing, and I would say CBS has no special knowhow at all in anything. No technical advantage, no cost advantage, no creative advantage, no brand advantage, nothing. He has had a fine career, don’t get me wrong, but the end of it is going to suck if he doesn’t retire soon.

And I am not picking on him personally – he has probably dozens if not hundreds of peers in the same boat, in the US alone.

IIFF/LA Film Financing Workshop with Tricia van Klaveren

The Los Angeles chapter of the Institute for Int’l Film Financing (IIFF) continues its successful Film Financing Workshops with a powerful seminar about GETTING MOVIES FUNDED. Â Don’t miss this intensive learning experience at the junction of filmmaking and finance!

I hadn’t heard of City of Ember or Fly Me to the Moon until I read about their amazing box office returns in “Houses of Worship.” It’s weird for films that pull in more than $70 million to escape my notice. But I did hear about An American Carol, a limp and unfunny conservative “send-up/take-down” of Michael Moore. And what I’d heard was this: it was an embarrassing flop. So I looked up the domestic box office figures for all four films:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull cost $185 million to produce and took in $317,101,119.Fly Me to the Moon cost $25 million to produce and took in $12,857,206.City of Ember cost $55 million to produce and took in $7,873,007.An American Carol cost $20 million to produce and took in just $7,013,191.

So, yeah, these four films together averagedâ€”by my calculationsâ€”something like $84 million dollars at the domestic box office. But why on earth would you group these four films together? Two of the three films lost money; Fly Me to the Moon barely turned a profit when its foreign take is included. But An American Carol and City of Emberlost more than $50 million between them.

The Institute for Int’l Film Financing (IIFF) continues its acclaimed Film Financing Workshops with a hands-on seminar about SUCCESSFULLY PITCHING TO INVESTORS. Join us on Saturday in San Francisco for this special occasion!

*** For all details, go to http://sfb.filmfinancing.org/021409l ***

Our expert instructor, Dr. Patrick O’Heffernan, is a real-world ANGEL INVESTOR and a seasoned fundraising expert who has raised MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in capital. A former Professor at a top university, he has written several books and won prestigious awards for his work as a producer, including an Emmy. Dr. O’Heffernan is an active member of two leading angel investor groups, FilmAngels and the Keiretsu Forum. He will spend a full, intensive day training film entrepreneurs how to RAISE MONEY FROM INVESTORS such as himself.

Learn more and secure your SPECIAL ONLINE DISCOUNT at –

http://sfb.filmfinancing.org/021409l

Our friends at Academy of Art in San Francisco are making their facilities near 4th and King St. available for our event:

The Workshop’s HIGHLY TOPICAL PROGRAM is based on IIFF’s proven formula for film financing success combined with Dr. O’Heffernan’s deep pragmatic insights and decades of experience:

SESSION I â€“ UNDERSTANDING INVESTORS
* The 7 Reasons People Invest
* The 5 Kinds of Film Investors
* Finding Non-Investor Money & Leveraging It
* Making an Impression: Impression Killers & Builders
* Building Rapport: Pitching Your Movie Before You Pitch It
* Why Your Team Is Critical to Success With Investors

SESSION II â€“ BUILDING THE PITCH
* How to Organize Your Pitch: Strategy, Timing & Content
* Budgets & Projections: Show You Can Be Trusted With Money
* Distribution Plans: Key to Selling Your Movie
* Talent Attachments: It’s All About Confidence in You
* Why “Comps” Are Needed & How to Assemble Them
* The Powerpoint: 5 Keys to Powerful Slides for Film Pitching

SESSION III â€“ MAKING THE PITCH & GETTING TO “YES”
* The Critical First Minute
* Timing as a Way to Gain Respect & Build Trust
* The “Head” vs. “Heart” Approach to Pitching Investors
* Staying in Control: When (Not) to Allow Questions
* Problems = Opportunities: How to React When Things Go Wrong
* Following Up & Closing the Deal

THERE IS MORE! An expanded list of topics covered by this Workshop, as well as additional event details, can be found at –

http://sfb.filmfinancing.org/021409l

Questions? Join IIFF’s community of filmmakers and financiers at http://sfb.filmfinancing.org/forum for answers.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to be trained by a WORLD-CLASS EXPERT who has successfully used the skills he teaches during years as an investor, fundraiser and producer. Over the course of his distinguished career, Dr. O’Heffernan has PERSONALLY RAISED more than $40 million.

P.S.: Other upcoming events include our “Nuts & Bolts of Film Finance” Workshop on 2/21 in LA – http://gla.filmfinancing.org/022109n – and the new “Grants & Donations for Film” Workshop with fundraising guru Morrie Warshawski on 2/28 in SF – http://sfb.filmfinancing.org/022809n – as well as a Film Financing Townhall on 2/26 in SF – http://sfb.filmfinancing.org/022609n

P.P.S.: Care to bring your film venture to the attention of FilmAngels? Leave a project summary with IIFF’s registration desk on 2/14! This month’s FilmAngels investor meeting is scheduled for Wed, 2/25.

But pay TV providers are right to be alarmed. Not only has a flood of TV shows and movies become available online, but the video quality has gotten better. Netflix is expanding its service that lets subscribers stream movies and shows from the Internet at no additional cost. And more and more people have home broadband â€” 57 percent of American adults, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Throw in the worst economic slowdown in nearly a century and people question whether they still want to pay for cable or satellite. As of January 2008, the average monthly home cable bill was $84.59, up 21 percent from two years earlier, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

“You’ve got these factors aligning at the right time,” said Bobby Tulsiani, senior analyst at Forrester Research. “This time there is a real, viable alternative” to cable.